Of course talking about an author's intentions is fairly futile, since any statement we make about them can only be guesswork, and in any case it is the work itself that matters. But the point is that although certainly having Hamlet's lines to Ophelia be cruel is a legitimate way of playing the scenes in question (and there are hundreds of performances to prove it), Shakespeare did not write anything in the play that compels that interpretation. If that's the way he wanted the scene played, then he was depending on his actors to supply something that, in my opinion, is not in the text.
I think that Shakespeare's mental notes for the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia were probably something this simple: "Ophelia goes to Hamlet to tell him that she cannot accept his love. Hamlet still pretending to be crazy, tells Ophelia that in fact he never loved her."
And then Shakespeare just listened to his characters and wrote it down what they said. His primary goal was to write an entertaining scene, and he knew that he was succeeding because writing it was turning out to be a lot of fun. And when the scene was finished, he found himself a little surprised by it and discovered that, as so often happened to him in the middle acts, the direction of his play had slightly changed.
This was not Shakespeare's method (as I see it) every scene. But I believe that you can tell the difference between the scenes where Shakespeare let his characters control what happened and the ones that were more carefully planned, because the first type of scenes are more alive and the second kind are more or less predictable.
As background for Hamlet's first meeting with Ophelia, Shakespeare had Polonius playing the role of a "heavy," the stern father familiar in comedies from the time of the ancient Greeks (and in modern sitcoms). Polonius, and then later Ophelia's brother Laertes (a stuffed shirt), disapprove of Hamlet as a boyfriend for Ophelia. In a comedy, this would be a classic set-up.
Now comes the time for Shakespeare to write the scene where Ophelia approaches Hamlet to tell him that she is no longer willing to accept his attentions.
At this point, as I see it, Shakespeare has committed himself to two incompatible game plans. The classic pattern for Shakespearean plays is that if two young people are in love, and if their love is opposed by unsympathetic older characters, then their love should ultimately triumph. On the other hand, the outline from Belleforest that Shakespeare was following required Hamlet to spurn Ophelia, since she is a dangerous diversion from his sacred purpose.
I think that a contemporary writer at this point would scrap the two earlier scenes between Ophelia and Polonius and between Ophelia and Laertes. But Shakespeare is known to have bragged that he never crossed out a line once written, although certainly he did a certain amount of revision. (On the other hand, not every scene that appears in the written text was actually included in the performance by Shakespeare's troupe. Like every director who puts on a play by Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself made substantial cuts in order to cut the play down to a reasonable time length, which for him was apparently about two hours.)
The reasonable thing for Shakespeare to have had Hamlet do at this point would have been to say to Ophelia, "I am sorry, but at this point I have to put my love for your aside, because something more important has come up that I need to devote myself to." But this would not make for a very entertaining scene and having Hamlet overtly state that revenge was more important to him than love would make him a rather unsympathetic character to the typical Shakespearean audience. (One of the odd things about the play is how likable Hamlet is, despite the fact that everything he does, including his treatment of Ophelia, is quite despicable.)
At this point, in any case, Shakespeare is totally caught up in the fun of having Hamlet (pretend to) be crazy. Shakespeare's number one priority was to write a scene that his audience would find entertaining, and his test for this was whether or not the scene was entertaining for him to write. So, following the style of most of the play, Hamlet starts talking to Ophelia in the manner of a jester. Once again, as an experiment, I substitute the word Fool for the name Hamlet.
Fool: Ha, ha! Are you honest?
Ophelia: Why ask you me this, Fool?
Fool: Are you fair?
Ophelia: What mean you, Fool?
Fool: That if you be honest and be fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
Ophelia: Could beauty, Fool, have better commerce than with honesty?
Fool: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honest can transform beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now time gives it proof.
This is a standard Shakespearean joke, and I think that it is in fact a joke that is found in all cultures (at least Western ones): the idea that a beautiful woman can never be faithful. And these lines, except for a last sentence I have omitted ("I did love you once"), could be put into the mouth of almost any of Shakespeare's jesters. In fact, Touchstone says almost this same thing in As You Like It.
Of course it is one thing to hear these words from a professional comedian and another to hear them from one's lover. And in the contemporary world, we are much more sensitive to the veiled hostility behind this kind of joke.
In any case, Shakespeare, knowing that the story outline from Belleforest he is following requires Hamlet to spurn Ophelia, now hears Hamlet speaking some truly nasty lines. I don't think we should conclude that these lines reflect Shakespeare's own attitude toward women, but I do believe that it was great fun for Shakespeare, and for many in his audience, to have Hamlet be as nasty as possible at this point. And whether or not we believe that Hamlet's intention was to hurt Ophelia, certainly by the end I think it is established that he has an enormous hostility toward women. (And I don't think that this was something that Shakespeare had planned. It is one of those cases where after Shakespeare gave his characters a chance to say what they had to say, he found that the direction of his play had changed a little.)
Hamlet: I did love you once.
Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet: You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we should relish of it: I loved you not.
Ophelia: I was the more deceived.
Hamlet: Get the to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself but indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What on earth should fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are errant knaves, all; believe none of us. Get thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father?
These are still lines that might be spoken by a jester, albeit a deeply cynical one. (Maybe Jaques in As You Like It). There's nothing so far that's really hostile to Ophelia or to women in general. Hamlet is saying to Ophelia that human beings in general are vile and that marriage is vile because it only leads to the creation of more human beings. So he would recommend that she not marry.
The line "Where's your father?" which Ophelia answers with the lie, "At home, my lord," seems to be a clear tip-off that Hamlet knows that Polonius is watching this scene. There's no other way that line makes any sense.
The scene continues (four lines further down)
Hamlet: If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.
Ophelia [aside]: Oh heavenly powers, restore him!
Hamlet: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already, all but one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go. [Exits.]
The misogynism here is certainly extreme. But Shakespeare is no Strindberg. Throughout Shakespeare, one sees the interplay of opinions as being part of the interplay of characters. Shakespeare seems to have been someone who spent a lot of time listening to men talk at taverns and similar places, and who loved taking the sorts of opinions one hears in such places and putting them in the mouths of his characters.
I suspect that this last speech here was as much a surprise to Hamlet --- and to Shakespeare! --- as it is to the audience. Hamlet's control started to slip, and he momentarily came out of jester mode. I can imagine him walking off and later thinking, "Did I really say that?"
And yet it makes sense. One doesn't have to have any allegiance to Freud to see that here Hamlet's anger towards his mother is spilling over onto Ophelia.
Of course it would be natural, and perhaps inevitable, for Ophelia to take what Hamlet says personally, but nothing he says actually relates to her personally. The actress playing Ophelia has a lot of choices, but as Hamlet complains of women who use excessive make-up and exaggerated cuteness, I imagine Ophelia standing there and wondering, "What the hell are you talking about? What does any of this have to do with me?"
The reader of the play (as contrasted with the theatre-goer) has the chance to stop at this point and look back and think about what is really going on. Who is rejecting who at this point?
Whether we consider Hamlet's words cruel or not will have a lot to do with the extent to which we consider Ophelia in love with him. And it seems to me that on the basis of the earlier scenes with Polonius and Laertes, there is no indication at all that she is really in love with Hamlet, although she was certainly flattered by his attentions. (She later speaks of having "sucked the honey of his music vows.")
Ophelia has come to tell Hamlet that she no longer welcomes his attentions. Hamlet goes into a fury and becomes makes abusive statements about women, which we today, in any case, can recognize as often typical when a man is rejected by a woman. In isolation, the scene works perfectly well if played that way. In fact, it seems to me that that's the only reading of that scene that really makes sense. But to see Hamlet as an angry rejected male makes no sense at all in terms of the play as a whole.
We have learned from Chekhov to read between the lines, to pay as much attention to what is not said as what is said. But Shakespeare was part of a different tradition. Shakespeare's characters are usually quite overt in telling us of their feelings. And what does Ophelia say about effect Hamlet's words have on her?
Ophelia: Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown.
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
As usual, a few footnotes would be helpful here. In particular, "ecstasy" = "insanity." But in general, the important point is quite clear. Basically, Ophelia is saying, "Jesus, he seemed like such a wonderful guy; before his words to me were so sweet and I let myself fall for him, and now he's gone totally round the bend." As always, there are lots of choices for the actress here. Ophelia is certainly distressed, but about the fact that Hamlet has lost his mind. There's nothing overtly in the text to show that it's because Hamlet has rejected her.
And then there are some later interchanges between Hamlet and Ophelia during the play-within-the-play. There's nothing inherently hostile in them, although it's easy for an actress thinking in terms of contemporary man-woman paradigms to play Ophelia as a woman awkwardly trying to deal with a passive-aggressive hostility from a former lover. Once again I experiment by replacing the name Hamlet with the word Fool.
Fool: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, Fool.
Fool: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, Fool.
Fool: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, Fool.
Fool: That is a fair thought to lie between a maiden's legs.
Ophelia: What is, Fool?
Fool: Nothing.
Ophelia: You are merry, Fool.
Fool: Who, I?
Ophelia: Ay, Fool.
Fool: Oh, God, your only jig maker.
Here it needs to be noted that for Elizabethans "nothing" could be taken as a slang reference to a woman's vagina (and the word "nunnery" previously could be taken as slang for a brothel), which makes the joking for us seem a little more harsh. But I think that with this Shakespeare, as so often, was merely going for a laugh. In Shakespeare's world, a reference to a woman's sexuality was not automatically insulting.
Ophelia's Madness
But then Ophelia goes crazy and kills herself. Why does she go crazy?
Or rather we can ask, why does Shakespeare have her go crazy? Well, if one imagines being Shakespeare and writing this play, one can see that at this point he has a major character who no longer seems to serve any useful purpose. She's a loose end that needs to be tied off. It's not going to work very well to have Hamlet kill her. So why not have her commit suicide? And having Ophelia go crazy allowed Shakespeare to have the actress, or rather boy, playing her do a nice little bawdy music hall turn in Act 4. (Modern performances are usually not brave enough to have this be as comic as it was clearly written. Shakespeare's audience was not uncomfortable about laughing at the mentally ill.)
But that's not really an adequate answer. Given that it was useful for Shakespeare to have Ophelia go crazy and kill herself, how does he go about making it plausible to us? And I think it is plausible. I don't think there have ever been many people who left a performance of Hamlet saying, "You know, I think Ophelia over-reacted a bit. There wasn't really any reason for her to become so hysterical."
After all, her boyfriend has gone crazy and been very nasty to her and then killed her father. (I think that in a performance, because of Hamlet's truly vile comments about women, the audience tends to forget that it was Ophelia who rejected Hamlet and not the other way around. And I think that Shakespeare, at least while caught up in writing his first draft, pretty much forgot this as well.) But I think that for an Elizabethan audience, there may have been a more significant factor. Namely, when Ophelia commits suicide specifically by drowning herself, I think that many in an Elizabethan audience would take this as a clear suggestion that she was pregnant, since drowning was the preferred method of suicide for umarried women who were pregnant.
But while Ophelia's insanity and subsequent suicide may be sufficiently plausible in the play, theres not an inevitable logic to these consequences. I would suggest that the reader perform a thought experiment and imagine some of the other choices. Suppose that instead of Ophelia killing herself, her love had changed to hate and she had allied herself with Claudius (not to mention Laertes) and all the other forces opposed to Hamlet. Or suppose she had simply disappeared from the play after the nunnery scene, and then reappeared in Act 5 as the bride-to-be of Fortinbras. Perhaps Shakespeare would not have been able to make the overall structure of the play work quite as well in these cases, but looking purely at Ophelia's story in isolation, would it still have made at least as much sense in these cases as it does in the existing play? I believe that it would have.
It's not clear from the language whether or not Shakespeare intended Ophelia's madness to be played as comic. I believe that he did. Of course her mad scenes play perfectly well if the actress playing Ophelia reads her comic words with a sad, tragic voice. Certainly for a modern audience, uncomfortable at laughing at mental illness, this sort of incongruity (irony, actually), where the words are saying one thing and the tone of voice is saying the opposite, works very well.
In his rehearsal notes for his 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, John Gielgud has the following to say about Ophelia's mad scene.
I'm rather sick of the wild indecency that has been put into the scene in recent productions, with Ophelia tearing off her clothes and clutching all the gentlemen. I don't think Shakespeare meant it. It must be a touching scene. You see, in Shakespeare's time, people always laughed at lunatics. They visited madhouses right up to the Eighteenth Century in England as we visit the zoo today. And Shakespeare knew that the only way to make madness pitiful was to give them a poignant, agonized, though not sentimental scene. And to suddenly make Ophelia lewd onstage is against the intention of the writing. I don't want to make it sentimental and Victorian.
Gielgud is offering here one possible approach, and obviously a very good one, for playing this scene. I think that the most important point here is that the scene should not be made sentimental, which I think is the result when Ophelia speaks her lines in a tone of sadness. I personally do not see that the text itself lends support for the hypothesis that Shakespeare intended the scene to be pitiful and poignant. I note Gielgud's point that in Shakespeare's time (and for a couple of centuries later), insanity was seen as comic, and it seems to me that what Shakespeare offers us here is comedy. It seems to me that Ophelia's mad scene should be consistent with Gertrude's description of her suicide, where Ophelia floats down the stream singing happily.
My point is that, if played straight, Ophelia's mad scenes are quite entertaining, especially if the actress can do a good job with the singing and dancing. And although we can't know for sure, everything we do know about Shakespeare's theatre, together with the many other places in Hamlet that are clearly comic, suggests that this is the way Shakespeare intended the scenes to be played.
Certainly the scene can be played otherwise, but to do so, in my opinion, is to play "against the text."
(In Players of Shakespeare 2, Frances Barber of the Royal Shakespeare Company tells about the way she decided to play Ophelia: "She is full of humor and wit and intelligence; she's strong, courageous, emotionally open..... She's the only person in the play who sees who's going on, and she goes mad because she's full of guilt for not having been able to prevent it." Barber further says that in the scene where Polonius tells her to break off her relationship with Hamlet and at the end of the scene she says, "I will obey, my Lord," she has Ophelia all but spit the line at her father Polonius.
(To me, this really exemplifies the fact that rather than pinning down his characters, Shakespeare gives his actors a wide range of choices in playing them, to the extent that a performance can work even when the actor is playing against the text. Not that I've seen Frances Barber's performance, but I can believe that it worked quite well, although this sort of disrespect from a daughter for a father's authority would certainly not have played well to an Elizabethan audience.)
Of course even if Ophelia's mad scenes are played as straight comedy, the irony is still there. The audience will still feel pity for Ophelia, just as Claudius and Gertrude do. It's just that in this case the irony is left to the mind of the audience rather than being played overtly by the actress. (And incidentally, speaking as someone who has had encounters with a number of mentally ill people and had occasion to visit a friend in a psychiatric ward and listen to her babbling nonsense childishly, I think that playing Ophelia's madness as childish and comic is actually more true to life.)
As to Ophelia's death, it would take a brave director to have this played as comic. And yet certainly there's something a little odd about Shakespeare's brief description that makes it very different than the typical tragic death.
(Enter Queen.) Queen. One woe doth tread upon another's heel
So fast they follow: your sister's drown'd, Laertes.Laertes. Drown'd! Oh where?
Queen. There is a willow that grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There, on the pendant bows her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled their wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.Laertes. Alas, then, she is drowned?
Queen. Drowned, drowned.
Laertes. Too much water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will: when these are gone,
The women will be out. Adieu, my lord:
I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze,
But that this folly drowns it.
The Queen's description is a nice little vignette, but it is not clear that the overall impression is tragic. Gertrude seems almost more interested in the flowers in Ophelia's garland than in her death. It is not quite clear whether the audience is intended to laugh at the image of Ophelia slipping and falling into the brook and singing as she floats down the brook before drowning. The phrase "melodious lay" certainly seems a comic touch. A lot would depend on how this is played. Shakespeare usually tells us how to think and how to feel, and except for the phrase "poor wretch" there is an absence of the usual words such as "piteous" which would mark a tragic scene.
Incidentally, for those addicts of "close reading," one can note that the text doesn't actually say that Ophelia committed suicide. It seems to say that she slipped and fell into the brook, although one can certainly wonder why she was climbing down the bank if she wasn't thinking of killing herself. In any case, in Act 5 her suicide seems to be accepted as a matter of fact.
My own opinion is that since the story by Belleforest that Shakespeare was following has Hamlet pretend to be crazy, and nothing in Shakespeare's text is inconsistent with Hamlet's madness being feigned, then probably Shakespeare's intention was that Hamlet be perceived as feigning madness. In fact, this is the point of view that almost all critics take.
However there is another possibility. I can imagine Shakespeare on a late-night talk show. The host asks him, "Mr. Shakespeare, in your play Hamlet, you have the lead character apparently pretending to be mad. However some critics have suggested the possibility that Hamlet might have actually been really crazy. Can you tell us, sir, when you wrote that play, what was in your mind? Were you thinking that Hamlet was in fact crazy, or only pretending to be crazy?"
And I can imagine Shakespeare answering, "Actually, my intention was to make it impossible for the audience to ever figure out whether Hamlet was really crazy or not."
It is fairly well accepted that Shakespeare based Hamlet on an account by a French storyteller Belleforest, who in turn based his saga on a twelfth century chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus which Shakespeare was probably not familiar with.
Not having read Belleforest mayself, I quote Harold Bloom's summary of his story:
The heroic Horwendil, having slain the King of Norway in single combat, wins Gerutha, the daughter of the King of Denmark, who bears him Amleth. Horwendil's jealous brother Fengon murders Horwendil and incestuously marries Gerutha. Amleth, to preserve his life, pretends to be mad, resists a woman sent to tempt him, stabs a friend of Fengon's hidden in Gerutha's bedchamber, berates his mother into repentance, and is sent off by Fengon to be executed in England. On the voyage, Amleths alters Fengon's letter and thus sends his two escorting retainers to their deaths. Returning home, Amleth kills Fengon with the usurper's own sword, and then is hailed as king by the Danish populace.
Now the first thing that strikes one here is that in adapting this story to the stage, Shakespeare, like some modern screenwriters writing an adapted screenplay, except for the ending follows the basic story line rather closely. (A tragedy, by definition, is supposed to end in the death of the hero. Although Shakespeare did not label Hamlet as a tragedy, but rather as a revenge play, he knew that his audience in fact liked to see lots of deaths at the end. So he ditched Belleforest's happy ending.)
And the second thing one can notice is that despite the striking similarity, Belleforest's story makes a lot more sense than Shakespeare's.
So when we ask, "Why did Shakespeare decide to have things happen in Hamlet the way they do?" I think the answer is clear: That was the outline he got from Belleforest, and he simply followed it. Furthermore, so little effort did he put into thinking about this story line that he didn't even bother to put the ingredients into his own play which would have made the story make sense.
In Shakespeare's play, Claudius at the beginning of the play seems more paternalistic than hostile to Hamlet or suspicious of him, so there is no justification for Hamlet to pretend to be insane. In fact, it is clearly counterproductive for Hamlet to do so. But Shakespeare had already decided to follow Belleforest in having Hamlet pretend to be mad, and this clearly engaged Shakespeare's imagination as a writer (since it became the central element of the play), so that's what he did.
In Belleforest's story (or at least In Harold Bloom's summary), Ophelia has been sent to tempt and subvert Hamlet. But this aspect of the story didn't interest Shakespeare, and so we are left with the puzzle of why Hamlet treats Ophelia so harshly. If, in fact, we believe that he does.
The whole question of character and motivation in Shakespeare is the subject of a separate article of its own by me, but in general I think it is clear that Shakespeare, unlike modern psychological writers, was much more interested in behavior than in the reasons that for behavior. This is because his primary interest was in the scenes of his play, not in the story line.
A scene or a speech in any play can serve two different purposes. First, there is the role it plays as a step in the development of the overall story. And second, there is the value that the scene has in and of itself, independent of the rest of the play. In general, an important scene will serve both purposes. But critics tend to find it easier to focus on the second purpose, whereas to me it seems clear that Shakespeare was focused first of all on the entertainment value of a scene in and of itself, even if creating an entertaining scene meant changing the direction of the plot.
In this way, I believe, Shakespeare's plays are (or at least were, when originally produced) sometimes like operas or musical comedies, where the story, although sometimes compelling in a rather archetypal way, is primarily a device for getting from one song to the next. Or, in Shakespeare's case, from one speech to the next.
In this respect, one can note that one can come into a Shakespeare play in the middle and, despite a little confusion about what the play is about, still enjoy the individual scenes. And you can excerpt a speech or, in many cases, a scene from one of his plays and put it in an anthology and it will still retain a lot of its value. It is much more difficult to do this for a play by Ibsen or Chekhov. On the other hand, Shakespeare is the sort of writer who you can't paraphrase without significantly diminishing the impact of the work. We don't read or watch Shakespeare for story. We read his plays, especially Hamlet, primarily for the words. Which makes it strange that critics often concentrate so much on the story.
Perhaps some people would claim that one of the primary reasons Shakespeare interests us is his characters. Well, so be it. But again, compare him in this respect to Ibsen or Chekhov. Shakespearean characters fascinate us because of the speeches they make and because of the ways they function in individual scenes, whereas for Ibsen or Chekhov, the interest of a character has more to do with the overall story.
In Act 3, Scene 3, Hamlet comes across Claudius apparently at his prayers and thus has a clear chance to kill him. But at this point, he goes into a brief soliloquy to the effect that killing Claudius while praying would not be an adequate revenge, because the result would be to send his soul to Heaven, so it would be better to wait until he can find Claudius in the midst of some dreadful sin so that his soul will go to Hell.
I think it is a little hard for most of us today to relate to this theological consideration. But Dr. Samuel Johnson, roughly a century and a half after Shakespeare, found this speech to be so atrocious and horrible as to be unfit to be put into the mouth of a human being. Still later (1811/12), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the other hand, stated that Dr. Johnson had failed to understand the character of Hamlet, and that Hamlet's speech is a mere rationalization for the fact that Hamlet has not yet been able to decisively make up his mind to kill the King.
Now since there never was a real Hamlet, it would be incorrect to say that there is one correct answer to the choice between motivations given by Johnson and Coleridge. It is in fact possible to read (and perform) Hamlet with either interpretation. And since Shakespeare did not put his views on record, one cannot definitively say what his own intention was.
However I myself believe that if one considers the type of entertainment that Shakespeare was trying to produce, and the way this scene functions in the play as a whole, then one can see that Coleridge was wrong, precisely because of what Johnson complains about. Since the scene in question doesn't contribute a whole lot in terms of making a plot point, in my opinion its whole raison d'être is in the emotional response it evokes from the audience. Shakespeare was never one to soften the emotional impact of his scenes for his audience. Quite the contrary. (In this way, he was somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock, another great entertainer.) And it would have been very weak to simply present Hamlet saying, "Ah good! This would be a good time to kill Claudius; well, no, come to think of it, I'm still not sure I'm ready for that yet." Not at all Shakespeare's approach to the theatre.
But I think that the really significant point here in understanding the nature of Shakespeare's work is the fact that which interpretation one chooses in cases like this doesn't actually have much effect on the overall impact of the play. All the motivational questions the we ask (and critics especially ask) about Shakespeare's plays --- why doesn't Hamlet get on with killing the king, why does he treat Ophelia the way he does, how can he justify causing the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern --- these are all questions that we ask after the play is over. They're really not relevant to our experience of the play.
Furthermore, at the beginning of Hamlet (as Harold Bloom points out), Hamlet is clearly a very young man, probably about eighteen. Since no significant amount of time passes in the first four acts, by the logic of the real world (and the logic which students in writers workshops are taught to be very aware of), this means that Hamlet continues to be a very young man throughout these four acts. But in Act 5, after a relatively short trip to England, the gravedigger says that Hamlet is thirty. (and in fact he seems to be even older than this.) This is a very drastic fluctuation indeed!
Sometimes the solution to this kind of riddle depends on considerations that are much more pragmatic than literary. It is possible, for instance, that Shakespeare made a point of stating that Hamlet was thirty year old in order to avoid offending some important person who might have otherwise believed that Shakespeare had modeled Hamlet on him. (We can be fairly sure that similar pragmatic considerations resulted in the loss of several important scenes from the version of Macbeth that survives today.)
But we can't ask, "What is Hamlet's age?" Because Hamlet only exists in Shakespeare's mind, in the text, in the performance, and in our own minds. In Shakespeare's mind, I am convinced, Hamlet had no age except at a few moments. And this is also true in the text, and I believe this is almost always true in the mind of audience members. The question of Hamlet's age is relevant only for critics and for performers.